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Comment by oropolo | Hacker News Reader

So if I sell digital certificates -- a PDF that says someone donated to my little media side-hustle -- it would be all good? See that's the problem: nobody will tell me what I can do to come into compliance. And as for the banks: I have been paying my taxes for years and the bank connected to this account has zero issues with what I do and are happy to deposit checks made out to my DBA (and then charge me a fee for having a business checking account).

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My recommendation to you would be to use a different platform that is designed for this exact purpose. Buy me a coffee comes to mind right off the top of my head but I know that there are sure to be others. Stripe is good for straight up e-commerce but it does not work well for your use case. I think the characterization of likening stripe to PayPal is way off base. When it comes down to using a platform like stripe for monetization of services and goods it really is important to rtfm. Good luck to you out there!

Make a few podcasts a month that are “members only“. You can make the links unlisted publicly, then just don’t get annoyed when they are shared for everyone by some nice member :)

Anyone who gives you money gets a membership, it’ll be minimum of $1, but it’ll be a “pick your own price” deal.

Honestly though, you could just use a better processor that isn’t such a behemoth that they hate their customers.

If the PDF only confirmation of payment it might be too similar to a receipt. I'd instead send the user a digital assets "In exchange for the $X I'm sending you a hand-drawn limited edition picture of my cat".

That said I know several companies that for years have used Paypal's donate button to run their whole company. It's seems arbitrary.

That would probably not work. There are humans working at Stripe who has a job of catching people who try to circumvent their rules.

From what I understand, they allow you to use Stripe for donations for charitable groups or projects.

Sure, they pay $2 for a "digital sticker" or something.

> bank connected to this account has zero issues with what I do

Stripe is an intermediary and I would guess this has to do with anti-laundering rules. Your bank doesn't need to engage in this because they have access to everything you do with your money and has more ways to catch/stop you.

It’s not your bank, it’s payment networks and stripe’s partner banks. Visa and MC are notorious for being the de-facto arbiter of allowed businesses, they have extensive yet vague guidelines on what is allowed due to porn stuff a long time ago and their partners try their best to read the tea leaves to see if what they do is fine.

If they are making editorial/values based judgement on who they allow to process payments on their platform then it seems they cannot be immune under the common carrier defense and are liable for being sued for refusing to do business with lawful entities, no?

No, Visa and Mastercard aren't common carrier and they don't need a defense. Like any other business in America they can choose not to serve you for any reason or no reason at all (so long as it isn't the illegal discrimination of a protected class)

Payment processors aren't "common carriers." Common carriers are a specific thing, and they're not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Have a little eBook that you sell in exchange. Or find another vendor that supports the "tip" model explictly

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